Is VMware Workstation Player for Linux a Virtualbox Replacement?

[Music] hello and welcome back to the OTB channel something a little bit different today I'm going to look at a virtualization product that's been around for a long long time when I first got into virtualization it was when I was working in the IT industry and we used to do a lot of testing of servers and we used a product called VMware Workstation at the time and it worked pretty well over the years that I was working in that industry however VirtualBox started to rear its head and took over I think one of the main reasons was it was a free product whereas VMware Workstation wasn't and I haven't really looked at VMware for years and years and years but I noticed the other day that they now do a product called VMware Workstation Player which is free for non-commercial use now it's a proprietary package so let's make no bones about that there's nothing open-source about this package but if you're a pragmatist and you're not overly bothered about only using open-source products it may be something to consider those people who wouldn't touch proprietary software will not want to know about this and that's fair enough it's completely up to yourself but I thought well it's free let's give it a spin and let's see how it stacks up against VirtualBox and do a little bit of a comparison not exactly a scientific comparison but a comparison based on how I use the product now I should say before we start that this is based on how I would use a virtualization product as a desktop user not as a commercial commercial organization and in that respect I would use it for well as an alternative say for jewel booting I could run a Windows virtual machine that's always a good good route just to have a look at a new distro or to do a bit of a review that's a second use and a third use is educational I install gen 2 the first time on VirtualBox and if you're installing arch for the first time you may use it as for that reason so virtualization products just for the desktop user can be incredibly useful beyond that there's all sorts of uses that the IT industry use it for but I'm not going to touch on them this is simply based on how useful would it be for a desktop user so let's get into it so let's start by having a look at a tool I've used extensively for this channel VirtualBox and you should see the interface in front of you now on the screen it's completely open source it's available in the vast majority of distro repositories interestingly enough it's not actually available in the latest Debbie and stable repo but it's easy enough to add by adding the Oracle repo it's open source it has a set of guest additions read drivers if you like that you can install from within the virtual machine or in some cases direct from the repository and you can also install an extension pack which enables such things as USB 3 you can see on this one the Debian installation virtual machine I I actually installed that last week to go through the little tweaks I was making but if I wanted to create a new virtual machine it takes literally seconds I would simply hit new on the interface type a name let's stick with there I don't know let's do Debian again but I'll call it Debian - it's already picked Debian 64-bit as the version and it has a long list of different distros that you can select there and if in doubt you can always select other Linux 64-bit but let's stick with Debian I click Next I'll set the memory I've got 16 gig of ram on this machine on this computer so I tend to use half of that for a virtual machine but nearly there so 8,192 Meg's I click Next I ask it to create a virtual hard disk now I always get given the option what kind of hard disk do you want to create I just stick with the default which is the VirtualBox disk image but you can actually create other forms including a VMDK file which I believe is the VMware default I click Next I always select a dynamically allocated virtual disk this means that it won't immediately fill up your hard drive with its full size it will put a full size aside for instance 30 gig but it will only show 30 gig on your hard drive when it is actually up filled up to its maximum size it then asks me how large want to make that hard drive so let's click 32gig just as an example and I create it so that's the basic virtual machine created are then go into settings and apply a few tweaks if you want drag-and-drop support from your host machine through to the guest machine you can share the clipboard here you can have it host to guest gets to host or bi-directional I move down to the system I always disable the floppy pointing device is always set to USB tablet for some reason by default I tend to leave it at that to be honest and if I wanted to select EFI this is where I click the button I don't know why it's still an experimental feature given that most modern hardware these days is EFI it can be a bit buggy VirtualBox is implementation of EFI as you know but it does seem to be getting better I then move on to the processor tab it says I've got 4 CPUs have actually got a dual CPU i5 but it's counting the number of threads so I'm going to give it 2 threads acceleration well I always enable VT - X which means that it can access the hardware capabilities of my computer you will need to access this setting in your bias or EFI firmware so that it can do that but it's generally faster and more efficient I then go down to the display I don't tend to change the video memory of the display but I do enable 3d acceleration and for the last half dozen times or so I've been selecting the latest VBox SVGA as virtual graphics controller as I found it to be quite stable I then moved down to storage you'll see that my debian 2 virtual hard drive is there but I want to hook it up to an ISO file so I click the empty IDE controller and I've already got the Debian Live Mart a non-free ISO in my downloads folder I've been playing with this a little bit so it's picked it up straight away audio I tend to disable that because when recording a video I found that if I enable the audio on a virtual machine it distorts the sound coming from my microphone but what you do is completely up to yourself as far as network is concerned I always choose the bridged adapter that makes the virtual machine just look like a normal computer on your network rather than creating a private network inside your network serial ports I don't bother enabling them USB well it defaults to USB - I could select USB 3 but I'm not going to be using the USB ports so I'm not that bothered shared folders if I want to create a shared folder that the virtual machine can read directly from on my host machine I would set it up in here it works pretty straightforwardly not really a problem and the user interface I just leave that it as is and click OK if I want to start a machine I then simply hit the start button and although it tends to start on my other screen it then gives me this screen as it's starting to boot in ufr efi mode and it goes through its normal process until we get to the desktop the virtual machine then just acts like any other operating system that I would be store installing on a hard drive so that's pretty much it it's simple it's free I found it to be pretty reliable yes it does get the odd bug the areas where I've suffered the most bugs is certainly in in terms of the UEFI implementation but that does seem to be getting better there we go it's actually booted I've also found that the shared folder facility and the copy and paste facility between host and guest can be a little bit a little bit buggy at times but generally speaking it does what I want so how different is VMware from this well let's have a look so VMware Workstation Player bit of a mouthful because there used to be a VMware Player and there used to be a VM where workstation and there is still a VM a VMware Workstation Pro but you're looking for vm workstation 15 player although it's actually 15.5 now you'll need to go to the VMware website where you can download it unfortunately you don't download it as a dead file or an RPM file it just comes as a script essentially a bundle file so by all means download it workstation 15.5 player for Linux and what I lie then did was I went straight away to the Debian wiki to see what extra packages I might need to install it's a little bit out of date to say the least the the wiki for Debian it talks about installing VMware Player for VMware Workstation 8 but I thought well the dependencies won't have changed that much and so I went to the section that says running VMware on AMD 64 and I followed this line which installs basically a number of Lib files build essential the Linux headers I also installed GCC and I then proceeded to run the package and I found the most useful web page for this is actually the arch wiki if you run Arch you can actually install it direct from the ua r aur should i say as there are various packages that are there for that purpose and in fact the arch wiki recommends that you do install the aur packages as opposed to the bundle package however if you decide to install the bundle which you have to do in debian the arch wiki gives you the dependencies which need to be installed and it then gives you a nice straightforward command you need to be root or sudo you just issue sh and you run the bundle i found that this was a txt installation initially and as the arch wiki does state here during the installation I did get an error saying there was no RCD style in its script directories and of course Debian is systemd now as his arch but as arch said I could safely ignore it I just carried on as normal and accepted all the defaults once the defaults had been accepted VMware had been installed on my system I then proceeded to have a play it's probably important to mention at this point the VM workstation player is free to download and use for non-commercial use if you want to use it for commercial purposes I think it's a hundred and thirty one pounds 95 so convert that into euros or US dollars as you see fit and that gives you the option to use it in a business environment because of that I would be very very worried about using this to demo distros on YouTube especially if I had a monetized channel and it would really have to be worth it for me to spend over a hundred and thirty quid on a virtualization package but if you're just using it for personal use there's no problem so you can see the interface in front of you it's got a nice clean interface what I'm gonna do is I'm going to go through exactly the same process as I did in VirtualBox and I'm gonna show you how to install a debian stable virtual machine so I'm just gonna go click on the create a new virtual machine button and see where it takes us it asks as if we were we want to install the operating system from you'll see that use ISO image is already highlighted there and it's already hooked up to the Debian non-free marte ISO so great I'll click Next which operating system will be installed well obviously Linux and it asks me to choose the version there's a few distros on here but the mainly the enterprise so Sousa Linux Enterprise etc etc and you may think that there isn't actually anything to do with Debian here but actually if you scroll up there is an entry for Debian 10 64-bit so all good we click Next virtual machine named Debian 10 64 bits I'm just going to keep that as default and click Next what do I want the disc size to be Wow 20 gig which it seems to be telling me at the moment is recommended we'll leave it there what do I want to do as far as the virtual disk is concerned do I want to make it as a single file or split it into multiple files um let's just keep it as a single file I'm not really sure what the benefits of splitting it into multiple multiple files would be it says it makes it easier to move to another computer but may reduce performance with very large discs hey let's just use a single file we'll click Next click finish to create the virtual machine so what it's giving it by default is two gigs of memory the network adapter is set up to NAT rather than bridged and it has other devices such as a virtual cd/dvd drive USB controller etc etc I don't want to automatically power it on at this stage so I'm going to uncheck the tick box and click finish write virtual machine created successfully you still need to install the operating system and VMware tools I do indeed so let's just close that we now have an entry Debian 10 and a very very basic interface where we can either power it on or edit the virtual machine settings so let's open up the virtual machine settings I think it's only fair to do a comparison with VirtualBox so the first area here is memory I'm going to drag it to eight gigs processors currently the number of pro processor cores is set to one it isn't telling me how many cores I've actually got sir certainly haven't got 16 cores that's an option on this but I'm gonna to choose two on the assumption that it's actually referring to threads it's asking me to set the virtualization engine it hasn't automatically selected intel vt-x so i'm gonna click on that just to try and make sure the performance is good ok the hard disk file doesn't tell me a huge amount here cd-rom connector power on ok network adapter app there we've we've got an option there to make it a bridged adapter and we've even got an advanced button right ok I'm going to close that because it looks beyond me without doing a little bit of research to start off with our sound card I want to disable that printer um you know I'm just gonna disable that for the time being USB controller USB - well that's what I set in VirtualBox so we'll just keep it as that and the display do I want to accelerate 3d graphics well that's what selected in VirtualBox so let me click on that it says I must update tools to enable 3d acceleration in this virtual machine ok um what I would say is that VMware tools is the same as VirtualBox guest additions so we will need to install them so that's fine now going back to this interface after the hardware tab we have a second tab which is our options so it's telling us the name of the virtual machine it's Linux its Debian and it's telling me where this is were suspended snapshot files will be stored power ok enter full screen mode after powering on that could be useful shared folders fine that's not a problem VMware tools time sync off I have no idea what that means but it looks like there's an auto update to that if necessary VNC connections okay and also login not supported let's just click Save now one of the things that I wanted to do on this was to set Debian up to boot in UEFI mode I've had a look through the settings and I can't see any way to actually do this from the menu however after reading around I have found a way to enable it so I can confirm that if you don't enable efi it will just boot in standard bias mode which wasn't what I wanted but after reading and doing some research let me just open a terminal here and make this a little bit bigger apparently you can manually edit the virtual machine file so you see my home directory there I'm just going to CD into the VMware directory that has been created and do an LS ok I'm now going to CD into Debian and do another LS and you can see there that there are a number of file the reserved VMS d-file a VMDK file a VM XF file and dot vmx file we need to edit the dot vmx file and we do this just with nano so if I open this with nano I don't need to be root to do this because it's in my home directory and I just select the vmx file you'll see that I come out with what is vay basically a configuration file and in this configuration file I add the entry firmware equals efi in double brackets i'll save that and i should now be good to go so let's click power on and see what happens the following devices can be connected to this virtual machine ok I'm just going to click OK it booted pretty quick there to the the grub screen so we'll boot and see what happens I should say that I've done this a couple of times now over the course of the week just to see what it's like and my general feeling is that the UEFI support in vmware feels a lot more solid than it does in VirtualBox it's just a feeling it's nothing I can quantify but it does seem like it doesn't struggle quite so much but as you can see it's booting now we're still getting this black screen which seems to be something to do with efi mode but hopefully we shall in a second boot straight into the Debian live DVD ISO image and we can kind of go on from there and there we go I'm not expecting to get full resolution on this at the moment simply because we haven't got the VMware tools installed but if I try and make this full screen let's see how far it goes nowhere at all so let's open up oops let's open up control center displays and see if we can actually make it a bit bigger just to make it usable 1920 by 1080 isn't there so let me just click the default 1680 by 1050 which seems to work across the board this is enough to get started I'll double-click the Debian installer what I'm really looking for here as we go along is whether or not it has set it up in UEFI mode and the Debian installer should tell us this as we go along so let me just set up British English our timezone London our keyboard aha this is what I'm waiting for the boot environment of this system right it's set up as EFI so that little entry we made in the configuration file appears to have worked now you've all seen this Debian installation before so I'm not going to take you through this we'll come back in a second when it's installed right so we're back I completed the installation and it was flawless I rebooted I've set the resolution back to 1680 by 1050 and the next stage that I need to do is I need to install VMware tools now we can do this in a number of ways the easy way for any distro is simply to access it the menu select install VMware tools it will mount an ISO file and you can install it from there in Debian it's even easier because we actually have the VMware tools package or open VMware tools in our package repos so let me just open synaptic I can't remember the exact name but it starts with open ok it's not taking us all the way there but let's go to open open open open scroll down until we find it and there is open VM tools I'm gonna mark that for installation hit apply and this should give us better graphics so we should be able to go back into full screen and do everything that we need to do we've already seen some changes there as we've installed it but let me actually reboot this now and see where we get to so after installing the open VMware tools package from the Debian repos or I simply rebooted it was in full-screen mode and as soon as I got past the logging screen light DM it opened up in full HD resolution just to show you this it's now at 1920 by 1080 automatically so a fairly simple process to be honest we have a menu at the top which allows us access to various bits and pieces we can get rid of that menu or bring it back and keep it there altogether I'm just gonna hide it for the time being and here we have our marte desktop in full-screen mode and it's seamless and I have tried playing with shared folders it works I have tried playing with copy and paste between host and guest it works if anything it seems to be running slightly faster than it does in VirtualBox and other than that it's doing exactly what I needed to do so I suppose the question now is do you use VMware or do you use VirtualBox well let's have a chat so that's VMware Workstation player so before I start I said that copy and paste was seamless and I forgot one one particular issue when I installed the VMware or the open VMware tools package in Debian I initially couldn't get the drag-and-drop and the copy and paste between host and guest to work but again a little bit of research what I needed to install was the open-vm-tools dot desktop package from the repositories and once that was installed there was no problem what doesn't it do it's a proprietary system and VMware have many many different versions of their virtualization products mostly for commercial use so what are the restrictions well I've just opened up a web page here VMware Arena ok and it gives us a list here of what it can't do it doesn't have a draggable tabbed interface okay it can't run multiple VMs at one time so you can only launch one VM at a time and to be honest that's all my system could cope with so that's not an issue creator managed encrypted VMs you can't do that you can't take snapshots which you can of course do in VirtualBox how much of a problem that is for you will depend on what you use the virtual operating system for you can't do advanced networking whatever that means you can't create a linked clone share a virtual machine as a server connect to vCloud air or have the command line operation okay if I'm honest none of those are things that I would tend to use so do you use VMware or do you use VirtualBox when you're a desktop user well I think it comes down to personal preference really both are great products it's a proprietary product VMware so if you'd prefer to use open-source use open-source and I would generally support that decision because it's only by supporting open source products that they will continue to exist and personally I'm going to continue to support VirtualBox however and there's always a however I was quite impressed it did feel very solid more or less solid than VirtualBox I couldn't really say both are pretty good these days the EFI implementation seemed to be quite solid i rebooted this machine multiple times and I didn't have any issues I couldn't say the same about VirtualBox there's a few things it doesn't do VMware and if I'm honest the things it doesn't do other things I'm not wild to use so it wouldn't be a big issue there were a few things though that I didn't like I didn't like the fact that it's not packaged in one of the standard Linux packaging formats which makes upgrade and uninstallation or D installation whatever you want to call it not quite as straightforward I'd like to see it as a standard depth file for Debian you haven't got that problem if you use in arch because you can install it as an aur package I was also a little bit put out when I got the error message about the RCD directories so he clearly doesn't really support system D natively it wasn't a big issue because it still worked however whatever you think a system D that's the way the Linux desktop seems to be going so I think really it should support that I didn't like the way that I had to edit a text file to get it to support an EFI installation as simple as that was and as solid as it was once I got it up and running but these are nickels really it's gonna come down to you what you want to use VMware and VirtualBox are both solid products they both do the job it's it's a matter of personal preference and it's a matter of choice and that's what Linux is all about so that's all I want to talk about today hope you have a great weekend everyone and I will see you next week with a slight difference to the video I've finally forked out and I've bought myself an alpha 5100 Sony mirrorless camera so I'm gonna be trying to set that up to replace the webcam over the next week but until then a great weekend [Music]

Channel: OldTechBloke

Views: 3,728

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Id: aiSMi4zOh14

Length: 38min 3sec (2283 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 23 2019